Witch and Spinner
by Strummer Pink
Summary: After being falsely exiled from her kingdom by her husband Gaston for witchcraft, Belleflower finds a place for herself in a small rural village brewing medicines and selling herbs at the market. All she wants is to be left alone, but this changes after she meets a disgraced spinner at the market, who has been shunned by the village for his crimes of desertion and cowardice.


They let him take the empty stall at the farthest edge of the market, close to Belleflower's own. There had been some argument among the members of the market about letting him take it and that was the first Belleflower, the village "witch" and herb seller had her of him. She had only been in the village for two years and this was the first she'd heard of him. No one liked to talk of him, for his presence was a disgrace to the village for some reason. They were only considering his application now because the village market was failing. More men left for war and few returned shrinking the once vibrant market week by week. Few outsiders travelled to their village for market day now, where once their bustling market had been the chief attraction of the area. Anything to bring in more business could not be turned away. Even if no one came to buy the spinner's wares, at least they people might be attracted to gawk or throw things at him, someone suggested in all seriousness.

Belleflower tried to follow the thread of the other marketers' conversations on the topic, but they spoke a dialect different from the one she'd grown up with and many of their words and inflections were strange to her ears. One word that reoccurred again and again in reference to the spinner was "Rumplestiltskin" which, if she translated it correctly in her mind came out as "rattly stick-legs" or some other such nonsense and she began to despair a bit at how poor her grasp of their dialect still was, even after two years among them.

On the morning of the spinner's arrival at the market weeks later Belleflower was there at sun-up. She always arrived early so she had time to read a bit of her book before the market really got into full swing.

Belle didn't know much about the spinner, only lately returned from war, only that he had not always been spinner, as spinning was long considered a woman's profession in this particular village. She had been gathering information on the man in her own observant fashion for weeks now and had found out quite a bit. She knew he had started out as a tailor, had gone to the war and come back in disgrace after being hobbled and branded for desertion and cowardice.

No one told her this, because few people ever talked to her. She was supposedly a witch after all, and the folk of the village only came to her when they were in desperate straights, all other solutions exhausted. They bought her herbs and tonics in the village square on market day, of course and saw her then, but what really kept bread on her table were the visitors who came in secret; the midwives in need of her special assistance to augment their meagre skills for a particularly difficult birth, the old men unable to couple with young wives in search of something to restore their lost vigor, the parents worried over children who did not speak, people wishing to locate a lost loved one or know the wishes of the dead. These supplicants came to her furtively, on their own, at dusk when it was easier to pretend that their neighbours could not see, the direction their footsteps led them.

She could not help all of them, all these needy people. Sometimes the problem was too large even for her understanding, sometimes there was nothing to be done and sometimes, she'd remember something that particular villager had done to her and simply not help out of spite. Usually, though she could find something within her powers to ease their suffering, at least a little bit, if not cure it entirely. And there was so much suffering, even here. An outsider would be surprised how many desperate people could be contained in one small village, thought Belle.

She lived outside the town. Not her choice, but no one would rent her a place within the village limits, once they discovered her exile from her former town for witchcraft. She told herself she did not care. She'd had enough of people and their mendacity and traitorous dealings in her old life, especially of men and the way they treated women. Still, this did not stop her from being curious about the goings on amid the people in the village, the feuds and scandals and petty thefts. She kept her eyes and ears open whenever she was at market to what the sellers at the other stalls would say and in this way formed a kind of patchwork picture of the different people in the village. Their stories entertained her and she thought of them frequently, but in a detached sort of way, the way she thought of the characters in her books that she had taken with her upon her exile from her ancestral home. Their antics amused her and they kept her company in her loneliness, but they existed only in her mind, and could not judge or hurt her in the flesh. And this was how she preferred it.

She was reading still, as the spinner arrived to set up his pitch. He moved in a hoppity sort of way on a pair of wood crutches, a bulging sack of wool and spindles of thread on his back.

Few villagers ever saw him. Lacking a man's proper courage, it seemed fitting to them that he should remain at home like a woman, tending to his child and his chickens and spinning thread, while his wife went out to work at the sailor's tavern in the village.

Belleflower saw the spinner's wife Milah following him now, pushing a hand cart which held a spinning wheel and a small crib in front of her, while a baby rode on a sling at her back.

It was agreed in the village that it was quite a pity that such a beautiful woman should have had the misfortune to marry such an embarrassment of a man. They wondered that he had been selfish enough to remain alive after his disgrace, instead of doing away with himself as he should have, leaving her free to marry another untainted by cowardice.

Belleflower had met the spinner's wife before and disliked her. Milah was tall and raven haired and people talked of her as if she was the most beautiful woman in the county. That wasn't all they said of her. Rumour had it that she drank with the sailors who came to the tavern and did other things with them besides while her husband was away at war. Belleflower did not judge this. Many women, hungry and alone while their husbands were away found themselves in such circumstances. Belleflower herself had done it once or twice for shelter and warmth on a cold winter's night as she travelled, destitute after her exile from her home. A man would not be judged in the same way for sporting with women, after all. No, the reason Belleflower disliked her, was because one day, on her way home from the tavern with some newfound sailor "friends," Milah had come upon Belleflower fetching water from the well, and told the sailors of Belleflower's reputation. Amongst themselves Milah and her companions had decided they needed to "purify" the witch Belleflower by dunking her in "holy water." It had been a chilly day and Belleflower had not appreciated their jeers as they tossed her into a horse's freezing cold water trough. She had nearly caught ill from the cold. Not to mention, in the process they had also spilled the water buckets she'd already carried halfway through the village to the ground, forcing her to go back once more to the well. By the time she returned to her little cabin in the woods, it was dark and dangerous animals were about. Belleflower knew Milah could have carelessly caused her death without ever even realizing it.

Belleflower now wondered if the woman ever felt badly for anything she did at all, as she watched Milah unload the handcart. There was something angry about her as she slammed down the spinning wheel beside the stall, then a low stool beside it and finally a little wooden crib, seemingly oblivious to the spinner, who backed awkwardly away, desperately trying to stay out of her path. Milah did not look at him, as together they arranged spindles of different coloured thread in separate baskets on the table. Carelessly, she jostled his injured leg as she went by. When he gasped in pain at the contact, Belleflower didn't miss the look of pure loathing and disgust Milah aimed his way.

"You and your useless foot!" she muttered and jostled him again. The spinner opened his mouth like he wanted to protest, but then just looked away, all the fight drained out of him. He looked down at the ground as if he wanted to disappear straight into the earth.

Belleflower knew that sort of look. She had seen it often enough, etched in her own face as it stared back at her out of the glass in Gaston's suite of rooms at the palace.

The spinner muttered something softly to his wife when they were done arranging the items on the table. The woman rolled her eyes and with a martyred sigh, took his crutches in one hand and helped him lower himself down to the stool with the other. Then she took the babe off her back and thrust it into his waiting arms before stalking off in the direction of the tavern.

"Wait!" he cried at her receding form and Belleflower could tell the woman heard him by how she paused in her walk, her shoulders stiffening in response, before resuming course.

"Milah please, I need the wool!" But Milah just kept on walking, straight backed against the wind.

Belleflower wondered what he was talking about regarding the wool. She watched as the spinner sighed and put the baby down in gently in its crib. Then he pulled himself shakily upright with the aid of one crutch and the ledge of the market stand.

Belleflower watched him from behind her book, helplessly intrigued. She had never seen a hobbled man such as him one before.

But she had seen a man hobbled. As a lady of the court of Avon, wed to Sir Gaston, a knight of the realm, she had been taken to watch the punishment of runaway soldiers. She sat in her box with the other minor nobility, next to her new husband as she watched this strange custom, so new to her eyes. They did not do such things where she came from, but then, Gaston laughed she was the daughter of a simple village merchant, unaccustomed to the ways of town life. People threw eggs and rotten fruit as the guards brought the deserters up in chains upon the platform, the same one, Gaston helpfully supplied. upon which people were beheaded once a year for the most grevious crimes in the land. Once the war began and desertion became the more common crime, these gatherings in the public square occurred once every four months, and then once every two, as the ranks of deserters doubled as the war dragged on.

Belleflower had responded eagerly to Gaston letting her go with him into town. She hated being shut up in the court so much, that even on such a strange premise, she was thrilled to emerge from behind the walls of court. She had been made eager herself, by Sir Gaston's enthusiasm for the event, the proper punishment of these craven cowardly traitors, who had done as well as to betray their people to the ogres by running. Belleflower had shouted and thrown rotten tomatoes at the stage with the rest of the crowd, pleased to engage in her first bit of unlady-like behavior in months, waiting in anticipation for the irredeemable, moustache twirling traitors to come before them.

Finally, the cowardly deserters were brought forth out of the crowd. What she saw shocked her to the core; a straggling line of poor, starving peasants, chained together by their wrists, with nothing but rags around their waists to cover their nakedness. There were marks of beatings on their bodies, their ribs stuck out painfully and their feet were bare. They shivered upon the platform, whether in fear or cold, one could not say.

There were things on the stage, Belleflower saw, as Gaston gleefully pointed them out to her. The rack of pokers, now placed hissing in the fire that the guards were banking would be for branding, he explained pleasantly to her. The special table that two burly guards brought on stage with the ropes on either end would be where they tied down the criminal and the huge mallet that the captain of the palace guard was swinging around on stage to the cheers of the audience, would be for hobbling the prisoners' legs, Sir Gaston grinned.

"They won't be running away anymore after this," he laughed heartily and slapped his thigh as if this was the grandest joke of the season.

Belleflower felt the gorge rise in her thoat as she watched the former runaways wince every time the captain of the palace guard swung the mallet in their direction. The crowd laughed as the prisoners jumped back, their knees knocking together in terror.

Suddenly, she felt trapped and knew she had to get away. She inched off towards the edge of their box. "I- I have to pass my waters," she muttered to her husband, with pleading eyes.

Sir Gaston scowled at her and grabbed her forcibly by the arm. "That can wait. How would it look to them if you abandoned our box now? Don't you know these peasants look to us, their superiors, to demonstrate full respect for our land's laws and punishments. If you turn away from this stern example of the king's justice, what's to keep this rabble from turning away as well? How will we keep order in our country then? We'll have a revolt on our hands, just like Roenburg did! I caught some of these men after all!" exclaimed Gaston. "It is the responsibility of myself and my household to see that they are punished according. And you are part of my household now."

Belleflower's stomach turned within her once again. "You- you caught those men?"

"Half a dozen at least!" announced Sir Gaston proudly. "It's easy to pick them off because we knights can use horses to run them down. All they can use are their feet to run." Gaston's eyes focused on a new movement on the stage. "Which if I'm not mistaken, they won't have use of for much longer! Ha! And here comes the Captain right enough!"

Belleflower tried to look away as the screams began, but Gaston's rough hands held her head. "Watch Belleflower!" he growled. "Are you a mewling little girl or a grown noblewoman? Mind your duty!" Belleflower was frightened. So she watched. How bad could it be, really? The first soldier was branded with a hot poker on his hand. The Captain held up the man's limp hand to the crowd so they could all see the letter "C" for coward burned into the flesh. The crowd cheered. Belleflower kept quiet, motionless in Gaston's strangulating hold.

"Now for the best part," Gaston growled gleefully, sounding more blood thirsty beast than man.

The branded coward was held down over the table and tied firmly with the ropes. Belleflower wanted to look away, but Gaston held her head fast, keeping her eyes open with his thick, sweaty fingers. An assistant stretched out the coward's right leg. The crowd gave the countdown, 1, 2, 3 and the Captain of the guard, Gaston's best friend who ate at their table every week, brought the heavy mallet down on the deserter's foot and ankle smashing his bones. The man screamed.

Finally, the Captain stopped and cocked an ear to the crowd. "So what do you say?" he asked them with a grin, clearly basking in the attention. "Do you think he's had enough?"

"NOOOO!" the crowd yelled back.

And smiling from ear to ear, the Captain swung back the mallet and kept on going.

Belleflower gasped and Gaston let her go at last, so he could cheer the activity on with the rest of his mates. Then a peddler came by with a beer cart. Although she knew Gaston would probably beat her later, Belleflower could stay by him no longer. She had never loathed another person as much as she loathed Gaston and the Captain of the guard in that moment. She slipped behind the purple cloth covering the back of their box as her husband paid the beerseller and ran back to the palace.

Weeks later, still traumatized by what she had seen, unable to get the images out of her mind, she sought some relief by asking Umberly, her husband's coachman about the fates of the deserters she'd seen on stage. She had kept her eyes out for them around the town, when she was let out, had asked her maids about them, but no one seemed to have a clue as to what had become of them. Umberly, looked surprised to hear her ask the question.

"Why they're probably all dead by now, Milady," he said to her, as if this immutable fact was as obvious as the blueness of the sky.

"What?"

"When they get off the platform the crowd usually tears 'em to piece," he nodded firmly.

"Others who make it out drown themselves in the river, rather than live with the shame."

Belleflower grew pale. "And the rest?"

"Well, you seen the pounding them give 'em on scaffold miss, all those broken bones, and no doctor or apothecary around here will touch them, obviously. Open wounds like that, not cleaned out or treated or anything, quickly get infected. The cowards get blood fever and die from their punishments and we are usually well rid of the vermin within the month," he replied with a nod of finality, as if this would set her mind at ease.

Belleflower gaped at him in horror.

Later, she scoured the town for survivors of the punishments, so guilty did she feel for her household's involvement in the matter. She felt guilty for her own behavior too, for she was not completely innocent. She knew now she could have stood up, could have protested or begged clemency for the poor wretches, but at the moment of horror such thoughts had fled from her shocked mind. She wished she had been braver, but she was too ashamed to embarrass herself in front of her new husband's house, too afraid of his reprisals in the bedroom to speak. All her pretty book-words had failed her in her shock at the town's savagery, and all she had done for the victims of the king's "justice" was turn her pretty face away from their misery. She felt like she had shamed herself and her departed father, he who had always believed strongly in the power of compassion and the equal humanity of all people.

She supposed she should not have been surprised that upon questioning people in the town, no one came forward to tell her what happened to the punished deserters or the names of the disgraced men. Perhaps it was because she was known to be the lady of the knight who'd captured them and had them so disciplined in the first place, or the shame of the villagers concerning what they had done as part of the mob.

There was nothing she could find at the time to counteract what the coachman had said, that all the hobbled men were now dead. How could a man in such straights survive?

But here was a hobbled man, _alive_ and fairly well, with a wife and a child and a trade in the village.

Umberly had been _wrong_. And if he was wrong about the punished deserters, what more could he and the other folk of her old home have been wrong about? The things they said about her after she failed to produce her husband a heir; that she was a disgraced woman, polluted, cursed, barren, worthless, a _witch_— that a woman like her would never find another man to marry again, that she would never have children, that she would die outside the castle walls without a man's protection, that she was fated to be miserable for the rest of her cursed days and never happy even for a moment, ever again—maybe they were wrong about that, too. Tears formed in her eyes as she watched the spinner and imagined her future, of surviving and maybe even being happy, unspeakably grateful to him for just being there.

The spinner, meanwhile was not unaware of herbseller's eyes on him. He felt hot under her gaze as he struggled to gather up the large basket of wool he was to spin that market day in one hand, while controlling the crutch that kept him upright with the other. He walked clumsily with the help of his stick-legs now (hence the oh-so amusing nickname the villagers had bestowed him with), and had been forced out of the tailoring trade because he could no longer flit nimbly about his clients as before, measuring them for all the beautiful clothes he would sew for them. He could still sew, of course, there was nothing wrong with his hands, other than the superficial mark of a coward's brand on his right. Had he been injured under other circumstances, he might have hired a boy to fit and measure his clients in his stead and continued on with his business. Before the war he had talked of hiring on an apprentice, but now no one would apprentice their boy to a coward and expect him to take orders from such a disgrace of a man. Soon upon his return, he was forced to sell the tailor shop. To add further to his humiliation, no one in the village would pay more than a pittance for it.

He was not unaccustomed to people like the herbseller staring at him. They either stared openly or quickly averted their gaze. He was used to this and claimed to himself he did not care. _Stilt-legs indeed!_ Well he knew the truth about them, didn't he? Would they have chosen so differently that day he'd run away? _I may be a coward,_ he thought when he was at his fiercest, _but at least I do not hide what I am._ _Not like you lot. Hypocrites_. Committing their awful deeds in the anonymity of the group, then melting back into their cozy homes as the group dispersed, safe from any risk of harm or reprisal from authorities. Nobody cared what the mob did to take out its aggravations on a hobbled, half-starved deserter. This was not bravery, attacking someone who could not easily get away or defend themselves. This was_ truly _the coward's way. The only difference between him and them he came to realize, was that they had the luxury he no longer had, the luxury of pretending the word _coward_ did not apply to them.

In time he came to understand, that this was why the villagers looked away when he first arrived home. He had tried to be friendly, to meet their eyes. These people whom he'd known all his life, what had happened for them to suddenly be so repulsed by him? He tried at first to study himself in the glass, certain he must have been horribly disfigured somehow, only to discover nothing particularly hideous about his person. He was neat and clean, as he'd always been, a small, ordinary looking man whose manner never gave offense. Only his hobbled foot was rather ugly, he had to admit, but he kept it tucked away from public view in its sock and boot, and the sight of it bothered no one but himself. No, he realized, they looked away because he reminded them of that thing inside themselves that they didn't want to acknowledge. Their own cowardice and fear. They recognized that part of themselves in him. Their weakness and secret suspicion that were they really in his place they would have _done exactly the same_. And really, who likes to be reminded of that?

Oh yes, he knew the feelings behind their eyes, the fear, anger, disgust, curiosity, even pity on rarer occasions, he thought bitterly. He knew them all and no longer cared.

So he didn't bother to look up to see which of these feelings told on the herbseller's countenance as she watched him lower himself carefully back down to his stool to spin.

If he had, he might have been surprised.

For when Belleflower looked at him, all she felt was _hope._


End file.
